Darwin's Influence on Modern Thought by Ernst Mayr

Great minds shape the thinking of successive historical periods. Luther and Calvin inspired the
Reformation; Locke, Leibniz, Voltaire and Rousseau, the Enlightenment. Modern thought is most
dependent on the influence of Charles Darwin

Clearly, our conception of the world and our place in it is, at the beginning of the 21 st century, drastically
different from the zeitgeist at the beginning of the 19th century. But no consensus exists as to the source of
this revolutionary change. Karl Marx is often mentioned; Sigmund Freud has been in and out of favor;
Albert Einstein's biographer Abraham Pais made the exuberant claim that Einstein's theories "have
profoundly changed the way modern men and women think about the phenomena of inanimate nature."
No sooner had Pais said this, though, than he recognized the exaggeration. "It would actually be better to
say 'modern scientists' than 'modern men and women,' " he wrote, because one needs schooling in the
physicist's style of thought and mathematical techniques to appreciate Einstein's contributions in their
fullness. Indeed, this limitation is true for all the extraordinary theories of modern physics, which have
had little impact on the way the average person apprehends the world.

The situation differs dramatically with regard to concepts in biology. Many biological ideas proposed
during the past 150 years stood in stark conflict with what everybody assumed to be true. The acceptance
of these ideas required an ideological revolution. And no biologist has been responsible for more - and for
more drastic - modifications of the average person's worldview than Charles Darwin.

Darwin's accomplishments were so many and so diverse that it is useful to distinguish three fields to
which he made major contributions: evolutionary biology; the philosophy of science; and the modern
zeitgeist. Although I will be focusing on this last domain, for the sake of completeness I will put forth a
short overview of his contributions - particularly as they inform his later ideas - to the first two areas.

A Secular View of Life

Darwin founded a new branch of life science, evolutionary biology. Four of his contributions to
evolutionary biology are especially important, as they held considerable sway beyond that discipline. The
first is the non-constancy of species, or the modern conception of evolution itself. The second is the notion
of branching evolution, implying the common descent of all species of living things on earth from a single
unique origin. Up until 1859, all evolutionary proposals, such as that of naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck,
instead endorsed linear evolution, a teleological march toward greater perfection that had been in vogue
since Aristotle's concept of Scala Naturae, the chain of being. Darwin further noted that evolution must be
gradual, with no major breaks or discontinuities. Finally, he reasoned that the mechanism of evolution was
natural selection.

These four insights served as the foundation for Darwin's founding of a new branch of the philosophy of
science, a philosophy of biology. Despite the passing of a century before this new branch of philosophy
fully developed, its eventual form is based on Darwinian concepts. For example, Darwin introduced
historicity into science. Evolutionary biology, in contrast with physics and chemistry, is a historical
science - the evolutionist attempts to explain events and processes that have already taken place. Laws and
experiments are inappropriate techniques for the explication of such events and processes. Instead one
constructs a historical narrative, consisting of a tentative reconstruction of the particular scenario that led
to the events one is trying to explain.
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The discovery of natural selection, by Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, must itself be counted as an
extraordinary philosophical advance. The principle remained unknown throughout the more than 2,000-
year history of philosophy ranging from the Greeks to Hume, Kant and the Victorian era. The concept of
natural selection had remarkable power for explaining directional and adaptive changes. Its nature is
simplicity itself. It is not a force like the forces described in the laws of physics; its mechanism is simply
the elimination of inferior individuals. This process of nonrandom elimination impelled Darwin's
contemporary, philosopher Herbert Spencer, to describe evolution with the now familiar term "survival of
the fittest." (This description was long ridiculed as circular reasoning: "Who are the fittest ? Those who
survive." In reality, a careful analysis can usually determine why certain individuals fail to thrive in a
given set of conditions.)

The truly outstanding achievement of the principle of natural selection is that it makes unnecessary the
invocation of "final causes" - that is, any teleological forces leading to a particular end. In fact, nothing is
predetermined. Furthermore, the objective of selection even may change from one generation to the next,
as environmental circumstances vary.

A diverse population is a necessity for the proper working of natural selection. (Darwin's success meant
that typologists, for whom all members of a class are essentially identical, were left with an untenable
viewpoint.) Because of the importance of variation, natural selection should be considered a two-step
process: the production of abundant variation is followed by the elimination of inferior individuals.

A most important principle of the new biological philosophy, undiscovered for almost a century after the
publication of On the Origin of Species, is the dual nature of biological processes. These activities are
governed both by the universal laws of physics and chemistry and by a genetic program, itself the result of
natural selection, which has molded the genotype for millions of generations. The causal factor of the
possession of a genetic program is unique to living organisms, and it is totally absent in the inanimate
world. Because of the backward state of molecular and genetic knowledge in his time, Darwin was
unaware of this vital factor.

Another aspect of the new philosophy of biology concerns the role of laws. Laws give way to concepts in
Darwinism. In the physical sciences, as a rule, theories are based on laws; for example, the laws of motion
led to the theory of gravitation. In evolutionary biology, however theories are largely based on concepts
such as competition, female choice, selection, succession and dominance. These biological concepts, and
the theories based on them, cannot be reduced to the laws and theories of the physical sciences. Darwin
himself never stated this idea plainly. My assertion of Darwin's importance to modern thought is the result
of an analysis of Darwinian theory over the past century. During this period, a pronounced change in the
methodology of biology took place. This transformation was not caused exclusively by Darwin, but it was
greatly strengthened by developments in evolutionary biology. Observation, comparison and
classification, as well as the testing of competing became the methods of evolutionary biology,
outweighing experimentation.

I do not claim that Darwin was single-handedly responsible for all the intellectual developments in this
period. Much of it, like the refutation of French mathematician and physicist Pierre-Simon Laplace's
determinism, was "in the air." But Darwin in most cases either had priority or promoted the new views
most vigorously.

The Darwinian Zeitgeist

A 21st-century person looks at the world quite differently than a citizen of the Victorian era did. This shift
had multiple sources, particularly the incredible advances in technology. But what is not at all appreciated
is the great extent to which this shift in thinking indeed resulted from Darwins ideas.

Remember that in 1850 virtually all leading scientists and philosophers were Christian men. The world
they inhabited had been created by God, and as the natural theologians claimed, He had instituted wise
laws that brought about the perfect adaptation of all organisms to one another and to their environment. At
the same time, the architects of the scientific revolution had constructed a world-view based on
physicalism (a reduction to spatiotemporal things or events or their properties), teleology, determinism and
other basic principles. Such was the thinking of Western man prior to the 1859 publication of On the
Origin of Species. The basic principles proposed by Darwin would stand in total conflict with these
prevailing ideas.

First, Darwinism rejects all supernatural phenomena and causations. The theory of evolution by natural
selection explains the adaptedness and diversity of the world solely materialistically. It no longer requires
God as creator or designer (although one is certainly still free to believe in God even if one accepts
evolution). Darwin pointed out that creation, as described in the Bible and the origin accounts of other
cultures, was contradicted by almost any aspect of the natural world. Every aspect of the "wonderful
design" so admired by the natural theologians could be explained by natural selection. (A closer look also
reveals that design is often not so wonderful - see "Evolution and the Qrigins of Disease," by Randolph M.
Nesse and George C. Williams; SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, November 1998.) Eliminating God from
science made room for strictly scientific explanations of all natural phenomena; it gave rise to positivism;
it produced a powerful intellectual and spiritual revolution, the effects of which have lasted to this day.

Second, Darwinism refutes typology. From the time of the Pythagoreans and Plato, the general concept of
the diversity of the world emphasized its invariance and stability. This viewpoint is called typology, or
essentialism. The seeming variety, it of a limited number of natural kinds each one forming a class. The
members of each class were thought to be identical, constant, and sharply separated from the members of
other essences.
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Darwin completely rejected typological thinking and introduced instead the entirely different concept now
called population thinking. All groupings of living organisms, including humanity, are populations that
consist of uniquely different individuals. No two of the six billion humans are the same. Populations vary
not by their essences but only by mean statistical differences. By rejecting the constancy of populations,
Darwin helped to introduce history into scientific thinking and to promote a distinctly new approach to
explanatory interpretation in science.

Third, Darwin's theory of natural selection made any invocation of teleology unnecessary. From the
Greeks onward, there existed a universal belief in the existence of a teleological force in the world that led
to ever greater perfection. This "final cause" was one of the causes specified by Aristotle. After Kant, in
the Critique of Judgment, had unsuccessfully attempted to describe biological phenomena with the help of
a physicalist Newtonian explanation, he then invoked teleological forces. Even after 1859, teleological
explanations (orthogenesis) continued to be quite popular in evolutionary biology. The acceptance of the
Scala Naturae and the explanations of natural theology were other manifestations of the popularity of
teleology. Darwinism swept such considerations away.
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Fourth, Darwin does away with determinism. Laplace notoriously boasted that a complete knowledge of
the current world and all its processes would enable him to predict the future to infinity. Darwin, by
comparison, accepted the universality of randomness and chance throughout the process of natural
selection. (Astronomer and philosopher John Herschel referred to natural selection contemptuously as "the
law of the higgledy-piggledy.") That chance should play an important role in natural processes has been an
unpalatable thought for many physicists. Einstein expressed this distaste in his statement, "God does not
play dice." Of course, as previously mentioned, only the first step in natural selection, the production of
variation, is a matter of chance. The character of the second step, the actual selection, is to be directional.

Fifth, Darwin developed a new view of humanity and, in turn, a new anthropocentrism. Of all of Danwin's
proposals, the one his contemporaries found most difficult to accept was that the theory of common
descent applied to Man. For theologians and philosophers alike, Man was a creature above and apart from
other living beings. Anistotle, Descartes and Kant agreed on this sentiment, no matter how else their
thinking diverged. But biologists Thomas Huxley and Ernst Haeckel revealed through rigonous
comparative anatomical study that humans and living apes clearly had common ancestry, an assessment
that has neven again been seriously questioned in science. The application of the theory of common
descent to Man deprived man of his former unique position.

Ironically, though, these events did not lead to an end to anthropocentrism. The study of man showed that,
in spite of his descent, he is indeed unique among all organisms. Human intelligence is unmatched by that
of any other creature. Humans are the only animals with true language, including grammar and syntax.
Only humanity, as Darwin emphasized, has developed genuine ethical systems. In addition, through high
intelligence, language and long parental care, humans are the only creatures to have created a nich culture.
And by these means, humanity has attained, for better on wonse, an unprecedented dominance over the
entire globe.

Sixth, Darwin provided a scientiflc foundation for ethics. The question is frequently raised - and usually
rebuffed - as to whether evolution adequately explains healthy human ethics. Many wonder how, if
selection rewards the individual only for behavior that enhances bis own survival and reproductive
success, such pure selfishness can lead to any sound ethics. The widespread thesis of social Darwinism,
promoted at the end of the 19th century by Spencer, was that evolutionary explanations were at odds with
the development of ethics.

We now know, however, that in a social species not only the individual must be considered - an entire
social group can be the target of selection. Darwin applied this reasoning to the human species in 1871 in
The Descent of Man. The survival and prosperity of a social group depends to a large extent on the
harmonious cooperation of the members of the group, and this behavior must be based on altruism. Such
altruism, by furthering the survival and prosperity of the group, also indirectly benefits the fitness of the
group's individuals. The result amounts to selection favoring altruistic behavior.

The Influence of New Concepts

Let me now try to summarize my major findings. No educated person any longer questions the validity of
the so-called theory of evolution, which we now know to be a simple fact. Likewise, most of Darwin's
particular theses have been fully confirmed, such as that of common descent, the gradualism of evolution,
and his explanatory theory of natural selection.

I hope I have successfully illustrated the wide reach of Darwin's ideas. Yes, he established a philosophy of
biology by introducing the time factor, by demonstrating the importance of chance and contingency, and
by showing that theories in evolutionary biology are based on concepts rather than laws. But furthermore -
and this is perhaps Darwin's greatest contribution - he developed a set of new principles that influence the
thinking of every person: the living world, through evolution, can be explained without recourse to
supernaturalism; essentialism or typology is invalid, and we must adopt population thinking, in which all
individuals are unique (vital for education and the refutation of racism); natural selection, applied to social
groups, is indeed sufficient to account for the origin and maintenance of altruistic ethical systems; cosmic
teleology, an intrinsic process leading life automatically to ever greater perfection, is fallacious, with all
seemingly teleological phenomena explicable by purely material processes; and determinism is thus
repudiated, which places our fate squarely in our own evolved hands.

To borrow Darwin's phrase, there is grandeur in this view of life. New modes of thinking have been, and
are being, evolved. Almost every component in modern man's belief system is somehow affected by
Darwinian principles.

The Author

ERNST MAYR is one of the towering figures in the history of evolutionary

biology. Following his graduation from the University of Berlin in 1926,
ornithological expeditions to New Guinea fueled his interest in theoretical
evolutionary biology. Mayr emigrated to the U.S. in 1931 and in 1953
joined the faculty of Harvard University, where he is now Alexander
Agassiz Professor of Zoology, Emerirus. His conception of rapid speciation
of isolated populations formed the basis for the well-known
neoevolutionary concept of punctuated equilibrium. The author of some of
the 20th centurys most influential volumes on evolution, Mayr is the
recipient of numerous awards, including the National Medal of Science.